Supreme Court 4/4 Tie in November -- The Scariest Worst Case Scenario

Why 9 Supremes Sooner, Not Later

I’ve been waiting patiently for someone to write up the case for immediately filling the vacancy on the Supreme Court caused by the recent death of its ninth member.  Not the usual arguments RE: the Senate should do its job, or RE: the failure to do so is an unprecedented breach of constitutional norms.  No, I mean the real, acute danger to us all if we wait too long.

I happened to be watching TRMS on Feb. 15th when the best case I’ve heard so far was made.  Here it is in a nutshell: the 2000 presidential election was decided by the Supreme Court.  If that happened again, the Supremes could easily tie in a 4/4 vote given the court’s current makeup.

A good point.  But we all know that in a 4/4 Supreme Court tie the verdict of the lower court stands.  And while it wouldn’t be as satisfying to have a lower court resolve whatever the 2016 equivalent of hanging chads is, there would be resolution.

Take it one more step, though.  What if multiple states had either close vote counts that required recounts, or a confirmed hack of voting machines?  The election of 2000 made the former a reality, and the latter may have happened as well—precinct-by-precinct vote totals in Ohio in 2004 are arguably suspicious. 

So far, a scenario where multiple states have vote irregularities isn’t all that unlikely, given a close election--or one in which several state vote totals are within a recount's margin-of-error.

Now, though, let’s drop the hammer.  Remember, our first condition is that the Supreme Court is effectively tied 4/4 election day.  

And, our second condition is that two or more state Supreme Court rulings are made regarding the same kind of recount or tampering issue.

For example, a hacker is caught manipulating votes in both Ohio and Florida.  

Unfortunate as this scenario is, what if these cases were decided for the Republican in one state, and for the Democrat in the other.  For example, if in one state the votes in predominantly white counties were digitally retrieved at considerable expense and recounted after a hack, but not in predominantly black counties, due to the expense involved, while in another state all votes were retrieved and recounted.  This would be somewhat similar to the situation in 2000 in which the Supreme Court cited the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution to halt an on-going recount.  

But if two states are involved in the above scenario, the Equal Protection Clause will be violated regardless, so long as a 4/4 Supreme Court can't resolve the issue.  And without resolution there’s no new President to appoint a ninth justice.  Checkmate, chaos.  Given our current political disfunction, this danger, even if it’s 1-in-100 or 1-in-1000 is too great a risk.  

Of course, if both states in our scenario certify their election results without a Supreme Court decision, a President is inaugurated, a 9th justice is nominated and confirmed, and if a decision is then rendered, the Supreme Court’s newly appointed ninth member could hypothetically overturn an election—especially if the Equal Protection Clause had obviously been violated.  Again, this would be an enormous constitutional crisis that we shouldn’t have to imagine, let alone live through.  A ninth Supreme Court justice installed prior to the election avoids the issue completely.

The larger picture is that deliberative justice requires an odd number of votes so that a decision is reached and one side is victorious.  Ultimately, this is why monotheism appeals to so many people: singularity leads to finality, and if we all agree to abide by that finality before it is rendered, there is harmony before and after.

Lurking, Following, Commenting; What About 'Skimming'?

What Drives Me To The Internet?

Social media have opened up a world I'm only just appreciating.  I've always had family, neighbors and friends.  Now there's virtually everybody in the world with something to say.  

There's certainly time for familiar faces on Facebook, for example, but I've realized, recently, that there are the equivalent of modern-day Shakespeares out there, to be enjoyed as well.

We have words to describe the process we go through in searching for these hidden gems.  "Lurking" has a disapproving frown somewhere in the background.  "Following" has an obedient ring to it.  "Commenting", meanwhile, isn't always possible, and when it is, it's often tucked away behind a click, or under an ad.

Have we settled on a big picture word for what we're actually doing?  Maybe a word like "Skimming" describes it.  We're constantly on the lookout for interesting, fun, creative material.  We bookmark, link and download in addition to follow.

What I'd really like, though, are ways to make skimming easier.  When I read an opinion piece, I usually find the comment filter "reader's picks" the best way to sort, rather than "oldest" or "most recent".  That way I'm all but sure to skip the crackpots and dumbbells.  

Which is why I proposed that Twitter adopt ranking in my post this January.   One can think of ranking as a way we establish what's artful and what's a waste of time.  And when you think about it, ranking is democracy for our daily lives. 

Feedback On My Little Twitter Idea

Thanks, Everyone, For The Good Ideas

Your messages (condensed) RE: My Little Twitter Idea:

1. Twitter works because we like little things.  So, you're saying: highlight the big little.

2. Agree.  Problem with FB and other platforms is: not succinct like Twitter.

3. Use "Favorite" and "Hashtag" instead of adding "Ranking" and "Community"

That first response wraps it up in a nutshell.  Twitter works because it minimizes.  But if it also promoted those best at Tweeting, it would be a much deeper medium.

The second response underlines: Why Twitter?  Why not look to FB or other media?  Answer: shorten 'er 'n' link, Capt'n.

The third response is tempting.  Within each hashtag, who has the most favorites (hearts)?  But hashtags are also used for irony, jokes and afterthoughts.  And fans would litter twitter with obligatory faves.  So, limit it: your favorite five Twitterati in each of five communities.

You may send more feedback to:  55jhs56  at  gmail.com

Update: 2/26/16:  I've revised my original Little Twitter idea to mesh 'Communities' with existing 'Hashtags'.

Update: 3/24/16: I've incorporated a commenter's idea (rank users, but based on the number of followers they have).  This idea wouldn't work, because of all the fake accounts, unless... the only followers who were counted were those who had submitted at least one top-5 ranking.

I will tie this all up in a subsequent post.

My Little Twitter Idea -- Finally Revealed

Tweak Twitter Idea Contest -- My Entry (for Jan. 8th update see next blog post)

On May 5th of last year I wrote about My Little Twitter Idea.  Or at least I teased the idea.  I thought there might be a 1-in-10,000 chance that someone at Twitter, or maybe a social media start-up, might somehow read my post and decide to contact me, wanting to know about the idea in advance.  But of course, no.

And who blames them?  After all, this is only my "little" twitter idea, still leaving my "big" idea (see contact information below).  But I've teased enough, so here it is, and you can judge for yourself:

Please, don't get me wrong, I love Twitter.  It has the exciting rush that is youth; the rapid giggle of delight at devouring a morsel in one bite.  But the Twitter-verse has a problem.  I know there're people on twitter who'd appeal to me.  I'd love to listen in on their lives; what makes them tick; the things around them they point out.  But it's way too time consuming checking out people the Twitter algorithm offers up as likely candidates.  That's because Twitter's suggestions just aren't narrowly enough drawn (Here's another punk band because your niece, who you follow, is in a punk band).  I want a better, quicker way.

I want Twitter to be way deeper.  I'll start out with a baby step:

Have a Ranking icon at the top of a Twitter user's home page.  Click on the ranking icon, if you want, and it takes you to a page where you can submit a top-five favorites ranking of those you follow.

A '5' ranking = 25 points.  '4' = 16, '3' = 9, '2' = 4 and '1' = 1.  Add together everyone's assigned numbers and you get a sense of who people enjoy reading.  So if I see a tweet from someone with tens of thousands of Twitterati, but only a grand rank total of '3' (three different people among those tens of thousands assigned a '1' out of a possible 5), I know there's not much there.  Likewise, someone with a high rank relative to their number of followers is likely an up-and-comer who's worth following.

For a second step along this Ranking pathway, keep reading.  What if, once you generate a top-5 ranking, you're allowed to join up to five Communities.  

A community would be a specific interest.  That is, book readers (tweeters who belong because they tweet about books), bicycle riders, or, say, listeners who enjoy funk.  Join that community, as one of your five.

Want more than five?  You can pay Twitter to be part of additional communities. 

What about Hashtags?  Obviously hashtags were meant to do something similar to what I'm proposing for communities, but I still have to wade through hundreds of tweets looking for gems.  Compare that to a community like, let's say, Astronomy.  Without a ranking, I have no way of knowing that Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a superstar and will likely rank in my top five once I'm exposed to his brilliance.

What about polymath tweeters?  If I'm a member of The Beatles community, but only tweet about the Beatles once a month, my feed isn't going to interest members who just want to discuss the Lads from Liverpool.  That's where hashtags can be combined with communities.  Only those tweets that are hashtagged are included in the feed for that community.  And even if your Beatles tweets are infrequent, if they're exceptional, you might still end up on someone's top-5, thanks to being in the same community.

And that brings us to a third step that Twitter could take with Rankings.  Instead of one's normal feed, one could instead jump to a single community feed.  And, within that feed, twitter users could be ranked a second time, thus making the polymath tweeter nearly as likely to appear as a prominent member.

My guess is that these three steps would mean:

1. Easy access to the most popular tweeters in thousands of specialized communities.
2. A way for good writers, and those who apply themselves, to gain an audience in a given community.
3. A way for Twitter to not only make more money, but grow accordingly.
4. The lessening of the Bot epidemic on Twitter.

How so RE: Bots?  Currently, Bots are used to create fake Twitter accounts that make a celebrity (or those seeking to be celebrities) seem popular.  If submitting a top-5 ranking using the Ranking icon involved some kind of character-recognition filter that required a minute or two to complete, it would be a lot more difficult to create phony accounts.  Besides, those with lots of fake followers would find they were in the same boat with that user described above, who had tens of thousands of followers and a ranking total of '3'.

Additional Update 3/24/16:
At Slate, a writer named David Auerbach has proposed a way to eliminate the negativity on Twitter--the responses aimed at users that have little purpose other than abuse.

In response to Auerbach's idea, Hjalti Thorarinsson, in comments, suggests that Twitter users be ranked according to followers (plus approved responses), and that this would heighten the level of discourse.  This would be a much simpler idea than my top-5 ranking system.  The reason it might be problematic, however, is that upwards of half of all large Twitter accounts have inflated follower numbers.

The reason I mention Hjalti's idea, though, is that it might actually make my idea much better.  That is, if users were all rated, as Hjalti suggests, based on their number of followers, but ratings only included those who'd completed at least one top-5 list.  The celebrity user with all the fake followers would rate abysmally, compared to someone with genuine followers who loved reading the latest.  So, by taking an active part in the Twittersphere, those you follow benefit--what better incentive?

Contact me about my Big Twitter Idea @   55jhs56  at  gmail.com

Prognosticating

Yesterday's Answer; Today's Question

Yesterday, to get a feel for American democracy's worst-case scenario, I read an article on the website VOX that suggested dysfunction in our politics could easily lead to a military coup.

This is simply not at all likely.

My immediate reaction was, "Where's your faith in America?"

After thinking it over, though, I decided that those who foresee a coup are simply viewing a decades-long struggle between Democrats and Republicans as a current crisis that has no such long history.

It may well be that we are experiencing an intensity of venom directed at the opposing party that is unprecedented, but hard feelings have been building for years, and are likely to be resolved in a predictable direction.

The year 2016 will see the nadir and reorganization of the Republican party as it copes with losing yet another presidential election.  The current disfunction in government will gradually resolve itself, however haltingly, as this process plays out.   We may be scraping the proverbial bottom, but I doubt we'll dip any lower.

Rojava -- It's Happened

Enlightened Leader Delivers

Americans are proud of Abraham Lincoln's phrase, "...government of the people, by the people, and for the people."  But we don't actually get together with our neighbors to govern ourselves; we elect representatives to do that for us.

For the several million people in Rojava (the mainly Kurdish area along Syria's border with Turkey), municipal assemblies see something like 50-100 people getting together to decide what their problems are and what to do about them.

Because voters in Rojava approved a progressive constitution, women receive equal treatment, the environment is to be protected, and education is to be universal; but these ideas were first decided on by a Kurdish leader, Abdullah Ocalan, living outside greater Kurdistan (as one might refer to the traditional homeland of the Kurds, which includes parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran).

That Ocalan chose wisely is to his credit, but is a leader's acuity enough?

Maybe, and if so, it's telling that foreign troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were, to a greater or lesser extent, unable to engender those same values.

We Were Nielsen Rating Guinea Pigs

Way Back When... In The TV Era

Nielsen Ratings, if you haven't heard of them, determine how many people are watching which TV programs.  This is done by contacting households and requesting that all TV viewing for one week be recorded in a diary that is delivered and returned through the mail.  Our household recorded our viewing habits for the week of November 12th through the 19th.

This is the second time we've participated.  The first, in the 1980s, occasioned my writing about the experience in Treetop Panorama, the print newsletter that I published back then (a kind of blog before the internet happened).

Both experiences made me wonder whether TV ratings really work.  The obvious problem is that favorite shows are, well, favored.  If I really like a program, am I going to admit that friends came over just when I was planning to watch?  If I'm fanatical about it, no way!  I'll write it down as a watched program, anyway.

Which raises the question of how much TV we're really watching, and how much is a function of, essentially, ballot stuffing.  I've read where the Nielsen folks have a small sample of households with gizmos that measure when a TV is actually turned on, rather than relying on diary reporting, and this small sample is used to authenticate the raw data from diary entries.  But fanatics could simply make sure their TVs are on and tuned to the right channel when their favorites are playing.  And if the gizmos measure how many bodies are in the room when a TV is on (another sampling method that I believe occurs), fanatics would still make sure they watched certain programs, where normally they might miss a few episodes.  And we haven't even gotten to the DVR (aka TiVO).

The upshot of all this is that Americans probably watch less TV than reported.

So, what programs did our family watch?  And did we cheat--even a little bit?

Honestly, because we use a DVR to record and then view programs at a later time, it was occasionally easier to simply write in programs when they were normally broadcast, rather than remember the precise timing, especially when flipping between channels and watching the second half of a program before the first half (we often do this with the PBS Newshour, so that our dinners are eaten when the softer, more calming news is on).

Except for a slight tendency to watch more, we stuck to our usual viewing patterns.  The occasional Newshour, Antiques Roadshow, Charlie Rose, Illinois Stories, and Masterpiece on PBS, Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, morning business programming on CNBC, Late Night with Stephen Colbert on CBS, and America Unearthed on History 2.  Other shows we recorded, but didn't watch that week: The Simpsons on Fox, Portlandia on IFC, Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN and The McGlaughlin Group on PBS (our PBS affiliate rebroadcasts programming from other channels).

Despite the lengthy list, we averaged perhaps 2 hours per person, mainly because we only watched parts of shows--and only occasionally, in the case of daily broadcasts.

I have written previously that I favor an a-la-carte cable/satellite fee structure with a large, rotating selection of additional free channels that would pay the cable/satellite companies to be included in a customer's channel mix as targeted, temporary promos.  Frankly, I resent having to pay for ESPN when I never watch it, and I'm sure others feel similarly about the programming I enjoy.

A-la-carte with promoted channels thrown in would seem likely in any attempt to end the exodus of cable/satellite viewers to streaming services on the internet.

Here's an example:

First, I pay 20% less than I currently do.  I get my favorite ten channels, let's say PBS, MSNBC, CBS, CNN, History, Fox, C-Span, CNBC, IFC,  and Bloomberg.  Then, second, my satellite company rotates another 20 channels into my package that it thinks I might like (based on what I already watch).  And finally, third, if I want I can either switch out, say CNBC for a new channel, or I can bump myself up to 15 channels instead of only 10; this would mean getting only a 15% discount, perhaps, from what I currently pay.  And finally, the 20 networks getting, say, a few months to catch my attention would pay to be included in my bundle and their revenue would make up for my 15-20% discount.

Don'tcha know, gotta go; TV's turned on.